Online advertising is an important advertising medium that continues to grow rapidly as use of the Internet expands. A key concern for advertisers is that the money that they spend on online advertisements be well spent. Consequently, online advertisers want feedback on the effectiveness of their advertisements so that they can adjust their advertising programs accordingly.
To date, because of the vast amount of advertising data (e.g., ad impression and click through logs) that must be evaluated, large-scale online ad placement providers (e.g., Google and Yahoo!) have only been able to generate statistics regarding online advertising on a daily basis. This delay can be costly for both the advertiser and the ad placement provider. For example, advertisers may continue to show unproductive ads or reach their daily spending limits too soon. Ad placement providers may lose revenue by displaying unproductive ads with few click throughs or by displaying ads that have run out of budget.
Advertisers generally don't find out about advertising problems until they take the initiative to review and analyze the statistics for their advertisements. This delay can be costly for both the advertiser and the ad placement provider, too.